Happy New Years from MMH!
Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, so this week we're celebrating with a review of everything we've done with year! This was a busy year where we broached a few new topics. We looked a lot at a couple areas where we don't hear much about Haskell development. Let's do a quick recap.
2019 In Review
We started this year by going over some of the basic concepts in Haskell data types. We compared these ideas with data in other languages. This culminated in the release of our Haskell Data Series. This series is a good starting point for Haskell beginners. It can help you get more familiar with a lot of Haskell concepts, by comparison to other languages.
For much of the spring and summer, we then focused on game development with the Gloss library. The end product of this was our Maze Game. It can teach some useful Haskell skills and provides some cheap entertainment!
During the fall, we then used this game as a platform to learn more about AI and machine learning. We explored a couple algorithms for solving our maze by hand. We tried several different approaches to machine-learn an algorithm for the task. We went through quite a bit of ML theory, even if the results we're always great in practice! Most of the code from this series is in our MazeLearner repository.
We closed out the year by exploring the Rust programming language. This language is like a mix of Haskell and C++. It's syntax is more like C++, but it incorporates many good functional ideas. The result is a language that has many of the nice things we've come to expect from Haskell land. But it's also performant and very accessible to a wider audience.
Upcoming Plans
This next year, we've got a lot planned! We're planning on some major new offerings in our online course selection! There are currently two out there. There's the free Stack mini-course (open now). Then there's the Haskell From Scratch beginner's course, which will reopen soon.
We're now close to launching a new course showcasing some of the more practical uses for Haskell! We're expecting to launch that within the next couple months! We've also got plans in the works for some smaller courses that should go live later in the year.
In the short-term, we've got a few different things planned for the blog as well. We're going to retool the website to give a better appearance. especially for code. We'll also look to have tighter integration of code samples with Github. Expect to see these updates on our permanent content soon!
Topic-wise, you can expect a wide variety of content. We'll spend some time at the start of the year going back to the basics, as we usually do. We'll move on to some more practical elements of Haskell. We'll also come back to AI and machine learning. We'll look at some very simple games, and generalize the idea of agents within them. We'll use these simple games as an easier platform to make complex algorithms work.
Conclusion
There's a lot planned as we move into our 4th year of Haskell! So stay tuned! And remember to subscribe to our mailing list! This will give you access to our Subscriber Resources! You'll also get our monthly newsletter, so you know what's happening!